GitLab Documentation guidelines

General Documentation: written by the developers responsible by creating features. Should be submitted in the same merge request containing code. Feature proposals (by GitLab contributors) should also be accompanied by its respective documentation. They can be later improved by PMs and Technical Writers.

Indexes per topic: initially prepared by the Technical Writing Team, and kept up-to-date by developers and PMs in the same merge request containing code. They gather all resources for that topic in a single page (user and admin documentation, articles, and third-party docs).

Contributing to docs

Whenever a feature is changed, updated, introduced, or deprecated, the merge
request introducing these changes must be accompanied by the documentation
(either updating existing ones or creating new ones). This is also valid when
changes are introduced to the UI.

The one responsible for writing the first piece of documentation is the developer who
wrote the code. It's the job of the Product Manager to ensure all features are
shipped with its docs, whether is a small or big change. At the pace GitLab evolves,
this is the only way to keep the docs up-to-date. If you have any questions about it,
ask a Technical Writer. Otherwise, when your content is ready, assign one of
them to review it for you.

Documentation structure

Overview and use cases: what it is, why it is necessary, why one would use it

Requirements: what do we need to get started

Tutorial: how to set it up, how to use it

Always link a new document from its topic-related index, otherwise, it will
not be included it in the documentation site search.

Note: to be extended.

Feature overview and use cases

Every major feature (regardless if present in GitLab Community or Enterprise editions)
should present, at the beginning of the document, two main sections: overview and
use cases. Every GitLab EE-only feature should also contain these sections.

Overview: as the name suggests, the goal here is to provide an overview of the feature.
Describe what is it, what it does, why it is important/cool/nice-to-have,
what problem it solves, and what you can do with this feature that you couldn't
do before.

Use cases: provide at least two, ideally three, use cases for every major feature.
You should answer this question: what can you do with this feature/change? Use cases
are examples of how this feauture or change can be used in real life.

Documentation directory structure

In order to have a solid site structure for our documentation,
all docs should be linked. Every new document should be cross-linked to its related documentation, and linked from its topic-related index, when existent.

The directories /workflow/, /gitlab-basics/, /university/, and /articles/ have
been deprecated and the majority their docs have been moved to their correct location
in small iterations. Please don't create new docs in these folders.

Location and naming documents

The documentation hierarchy can be vastly improved by providing a better layout
and organization of directories.

Having a structured document layout, we will be able to have meaningful URLs
like docs.gitlab.com/user/project/merge_requests/index.html. With this pattern,
you can immediately tell that you are navigating a user related documentation
and is about the project and its merge requests.

Do not create summaries of similar types of content (e.g. an index of all articles, videos, etc.),
rather organize content by its subject (e.g. everything related to CI goes together)
and cross-link between any related content.

The table below shows what kind of documentation goes where.

Directory

What belongs here

doc/user/

User related documentation. Anything that can be done within the GitLab UI goes here including /admin.

doc/administration/

Documentation that requires the user to have access to the server where GitLab is installed. The admin settings that can be accessed via GitLab's interface go under doc/user/admin_area/.

doc/api/

API related documentation.

doc/development/

Documentation related to the development of GitLab. Any styleguides should go here.

doc/legal/

Legal documents about contributing to GitLab.

doc/install/

Probably the most visited directory, since installation.md is there. Ideally this should go under doc/administration/, but it's best to leave it as-is in order to avoid confusion (still debated though).

doc/update/

Same with doc/install/. Should be under administration/, but this is a well known location, better leave as-is, at least for now.

doc/topics/

Indexes per Topic (doc/topics/topic-name/index.md): all resources for that topic (user and admin documentation, articles, and third-party docs)

General rules:

The correct naming and location of a new document, is a combination
of the relative URL of the document in question and the GitLab Map design
that is used for UX purposes (source, image).

When creating a new document and it has more than one word in its name,
make sure to use underscores instead of spaces or dashes (-). For example,
a proper naming would be import_projects_from_github.md. The same rule
applies to images.

Start a new directory with an index.md file.

There are four main directories, user, administration, api and development.

The doc/user/ directory has five main subdirectories: project/, group/,
profile/, dashboard/ and admin_area/.

doc/user/project/ should contain all project related documentation.

doc/user/group/ should contain all group related documentation.

doc/user/profile/ should contain all profile related documentation.
Every page you would navigate under /profile should have its own document,
i.e. account.md, applications.md, emails.md, etc.

doc/user/admin_area/ should contain all admin related documentation
describing what can be achieved by accessing GitLab's admin interface
(not to be confused with doc/administration where server access is
required).

Every category under /admin/application_settings should have its
own document located at doc/user/admin_area/settings/. For example,
the Visibility and Access Controls category should have a document
located at doc/user/admin_area/settings/visibility_and_access_controls.md.

The doc/topics/ directory holds topic-related technical content. Create
doc/topics/topic-name/subtopic-name/index.md when subtopics become necessary.
General user- and admin- related documentation, should be placed accordingly.

If you are unsure where a document should live, you can ping @axil or @marcia in your
merge request.

Changing document location

Changing a document's location is not to be taken lightly. Remember that the
documentation is available to all installations under help/ and not only to
GitLab.com or http://docs.gitlab.com. Make sure this is discussed with the
Documentation team beforehand.

If you indeed need to change a document's location, do NOT remove the old
document, but rather replace all of its contents with a new line:

This document was moved to [another location](path/to/new_doc.md).

where path/to/new_doc.md is the relative path to the root directory doc/.

For example, if you were to move doc/workflow/lfs/lfs_administration.md to
doc/administration/lfs.md, then the steps would be:

This document was moved to [another location](../../administration/lfs.md).

Find and replace any occurrences of the old location with the new one.
A quick way to find them is to use git grep. First go to the root directory
where you cloned the gitlab-ce repository and then do:

Note:
If the document being moved has any Disqus comments on it, there are extra steps
to follow documented just below.

Things to note:

Since we also use inline documentation, except for the documentation itself,
the document might also be referenced in the views of GitLab (app/) which will
render when visiting /help, and sometimes in the testing suite (spec/).

The above git grep command will search recursively in the directory you run
it in for workflow/lfs/lfs_administration and lfs/lfs_administration
and will print the file and the line where this file is mentioned.
You may ask why the two greps. Since we use relative paths to link to
documentation, sometimes it might be useful to search a path deeper.

The *.md extension is not used when a document is linked to GitLab's
built-in help page, that's why we omit it in git grep.

Use the checklist on the documentation MR description template.

Redirections for pages with Disqus comments

If the documentation page being relocated already has any Disqus comments,
we need to preserve the Disqus thread.

Disqus uses an identifier per page, and for docs.gitlab.com, the page identifier
is configured to be the page URL. Therefore, when we change the document location,
we need to preserve the old URL as the same Disqus identifier.

To do that, add to the frontmatter the variable redirect_from,
using the old URL as value. For example, let's say I moved the document
available under https://docs.gitlab.com/my-old-location/README.html to a new location,
https://docs.gitlab.com/my-new-location/index.html.

Note: it is necessary to include the file name in the redirect_from URL,
even if it's index.html or README.html.

Testing

We treat documentation as code, thus have implemented some testing.
Currently, the following tests are in place:

docs lint: Check that all internal (relative) links work correctly and
that all cURL examples in API docs use the full switches. It's recommended
to check locally before pushing to GitLab by executing the command
bundle exec nanoc check internal_links on your local
gitlab-docs directory.

ee_compat_check (runs on CE only):
When you submit a merge request to GitLab Community Edition (CE),
there is this additional job that runs against Enterprise Edition (EE)
and checks if your changes can apply cleanly to the EE codebase.
If that job fails, read the instructions in the job log for what to do next.
As CE is merged into EE once a day, it's important to avoid merge conflicts.
Submitting an EE-equivalent merge request cherry-picking all commits from CE to EE is
essential to avoid them.

Branch naming

If your contribution contains only documentation changes, you can speed up
the CI process by following some branch naming conventions. You have three
choices:

Branch name

Valid example

Starting with docs/

docs/update-api-issues

Starting with docs-

docs-update-api-issues

Ending in -docs

123-update-api-issues-docs

If your branch name matches any of the above, it will run only the docs
tests. If it doesn't, the whole test suite will run (including docs).

Note:
If the release version you want to add the documentation to has already been
frozen or released, use the label Pick into X.Y to get it merged into
the correct release. Avoid picking into a past release as much as you can, as
it increases the work of the release managers.

Cherry-picking from CE to EE

As we have the master branch of CE merged into EE once a day, it's common to
run into merge conflicts. To avoid them, we test for merge conflicts against EE
with the ee-compat-check job, and use the following method of creating equivalent
branches for CE and EE.

Once all the jobs are passing in CE and EE, and you've addressed the
feedback from your own team, assign the CE MR to a technical writer for review

When both MRs are ready, the EE merge request will be merged first, and the
CE-equivalent will be merged next.

Note that the review will occur only in the CE MR, as the EE MR
contains the same commits as the CE MR.

If you have a few more changes that apply to the EE-version only, you can submit
a couple more commits to the EE branch, but ask the reviewer to review the EE merge request
additionally to the CE MR. If there are many EE-only changes though, start a new MR
to EE only.

Previewing the changes live

To preview your changes to documentation locally, please follow
this development guide.

If you want to preview the doc changes of your merge request live, you can use
the manual review-docs-deploy job in your merge request. You will need at
least Master permissions to be able to run it and is currently enabled for the
following projects:

Note:
You will need to push a branch to those repositories, it doesn't work for forks.

Tip:
If your branch contains only documentation changes, you can use
special branch names to avoid long running pipelines.

In the mini pipeline graph, you should see an >> icon. Clicking on it will
reveal the review-docs-deploy job. Hit the play button for the job to start.

This job will:

Create a new branch in the gitlab-docs
project named after the scheme: preview-<branch-slug>

Trigger a cross project pipeline and build the docs site with your changes

After a few minutes, the Review App will be deployed and you will be able to
preview the changes. The docs URL can be found in two places:

In the merge request widget

In the output of the review-docs-deploy job, which also includes the
triggered pipeline so that you can investigate whether something went wrong

In case the Review App URL returns 404, follow these steps to debug:

Did you follow the URL from the merge request widget? If yes, then check if
the link is the same as the one in the job output. It can happen that if the
branch name slug is longer than 35 characters, it is automatically
truncated. That means that the merge request widget will not show the proper
URL due to a limitation of how environment: url works, but you can find the
real URL from the output of the review-docs-deploy job.

Did you follow the URL from the job output? If yes, then it means that
either the site is not yet deployed or something went wrong with the remote
pipeline. Give it a few minutes and it should appear online, otherwise you
can check the status of the remote pipeline from the link in the job output.
If the pipeline failed or got stuck, drop a line in the #docs chat channel.

Tip:
Someone that has no merge rights to the CE/EE projects (think of forks from
contributors) will not be able to run the manual job. In that case, you can
ask someone from the GitLab team who has the permissions to do that for you.

Note:
Make sure that you always delete the branch of the merge request you were
working on. If you don't, the remote docs branch won't be removed either,
and the server where the Review Apps are hosted will eventually be out of
disk space.

GitLab /help

Every GitLab instance includes the documentation, which is available from /help
(http://my-instance.com/help), e.g., https://gitlab.com/help.

When you're building a new feature, you may need to link the documentation
from GitLab, the application. This is normally done in files inside the
app/views/ directory with the help of the help_page_path helper method.

In its simplest form, the HAML code to generate a link to the /help page is:

=link_to'Help page',help_page_path('user/permissions')

The help_page_path contains the path to the document you want to link to with
the following conventions:

it is relative to the doc/ directory in the GitLab repository

the .md extension must be omitted

it must not end with a slash (/)

Below are some special cases where should be used depending on the context.
You can combine one or more of the following:

Linking to an anchor link. Use anchor as part of the help_page_path
method:

Adding a period at the end of the sentence. Useful when you don't want
the period to be part of the link:

=succeed'.'do
Learn more in the
=link_to'Help page',help_page_path('user/permissions')

General Documentation vs Technical Articles

General documentation

General documentation is categorized by User, Admin, and Contributor, and describe what that feature is, what it does, and its available settings.

Technical Articles

Technical articles replace technical content that once lived in the GitLab Blog, where they got out-of-date and weren't easily found.

They are topic-related documentation, written with an user-friendly approach and language, aiming to provide the community with guidance on specific processes to achieve certain objectives.

A technical article guides users and/or admins to achieve certain objectives (within guides and tutorials), or provide an overview of that particular topic or feature (within technical overviews). It can also describe the use, implementation, or integration of third-party tools with GitLab.

They should be placed in a new directory named /article-title/index.md under a topic-related folder, and their images should be placed in /article-title/img/. For example, a new article on GitLab Pages should be placed in doc/user/project/pages/article-title/ and a new article on GitLab CI/CD should be placed in doc/ci/examples/article-title/.

Types of Technical Articles

User guides: technical content to guide regular users from point A to point B

Admin guides: technical content to guide administrators of GitLab instances from point A to point B

Tutorials: technical content provided step-by-step on how to do things, or how to reach very specific objectives

Understanding guides, tutorials, and technical overviews

Suppose there's a process to go from point A to point B in 5 steps: (A) 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 (B).

A guide can be understood as a description of certain processes to achieve a particular objective. A guide brings you from A to B describing the characteristics of that process, but not necessarily going over each step. It can mention, for example, steps 2 and 3, but does not necessarily explain how to accomplish them.

A tutorial requires a clear step-by-step guidance to achieve a singular objective. It brings you from A to B, describing precisely all the necessary steps involved in that process, showing each of the 5 steps to go from A to B.
It does not only describes steps 2 and 3, but also shows you how to accomplish them.